The Feast of the Assumption ~ God Reciprocates

It immediately brought to mind the image of the annunciation when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. I knelt to pray and pondered the following

I am writing this from the South of France while staying here with family. I awoke this morning to find the following message from a priest friend

On this, the feast of the assumption, the collect (for the vigil yesterday) says that the Son of God dwelt in Mary (at the beginning of his earthly life). Then at the end of her earthly life, Mary is Assumed to dwell in Him, in Heaven. God reciprocates. He does to us what we have done to him which we see in Matthew 25 “ for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’

³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? ³⁸ When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? ³⁹ Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ ⁴⁰ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” Our concern for others is a concern for Christ. Love Jesus in Mary today, give thanks for them, and you will be happy forever.

I recall St Mother Theresa saying that she could respond to any person who asked her about her mission in just 5 words “That you did unto me”.

We made our way to the Church of the Assumption in St Tropez for mass and as we left I turned to see this beam of light penetrating through the top window;

It immediately brought to mind the image of the annunciation when the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary. I knelt to pray and pondered the following;

What state am I in when I receive Jesus? Though I receive everything from God, why do I so often grasp for more, or something different according to my word and my will? Do I have the humility to stay constant and consistent to those words He gave us ‘thy will be done’, throughout my life as Mary did? Is the way I treat others too often dependent on the way they treat me, such that I miss opportunities to love?

Just this week Pope Leo XIV said

If we deny the love that has generated us, if by betraying we become unfaithful to ourselves, then we truly lose the meaning of our coming into the world, and we exclude ourselves from salvation.

Our Lady did not deny the love who generated us, she did not betray, nor was she unfaithful. She remains for us the perfect model of discipleship and if we stay close to her, (like the beloved disciple John at the foot of the cross) we will stay close to Christ her son.

I cannot be a perfect mother to my children in this world, but I can entrust them to the care of my heavenly mother who can succeed where I fail.

Happy Feast of the Assumption!

Below is an extract taken from Butler’s Lives of the Saints.

15th August THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, ON THE FEAST OF HER ASSUMPTION INTO HEAVEN (FIRST CENTURY)

Mary was a Jewish maiden of the house of David and the tribe of Judah, whose parents are commonly referred to as St Joachim and St Anne. At her conception, that is, when God infused a soul into her embryonic body, she was preserved by Him from all taint of original sin (the Immaculate Conception, December 8); her birth, which the Church celebrates on September 8, may have taken place at Sepphoris or Nazareth, but a general tradition favours Jerusalem, at a spot adjoining the Pool of Bethesda, close to a gate still called by Mohammedans (but not, curiously enough, by Christians), Bab Sitti Maryam, the Gate of the Lady Mary. She is believed to have been a child of promise to her long childless parents, and on November 21 the Church keeps a feast of her presentation in the Temple, though upon what occasion is not certain. According to apocryphal writings she remained within the Temple precincts in order to be brought up with other Jewish children, and at the age of fourteen was betrothed to a carpenter, Joseph, her husband being indicated to the high priest by a miracle. While still only betrothed she was visited by the Archangel Gabriel (the Annunciation, March 25) and the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became incarnate by the power of the Holy Ghost in her womb. This was at Nazareth, at which journeyed into Judaea to see her cousin St Elizabeth, who also was with child, St John the Baptist (the Visitation, July 2). The marriage with St Joseph was duly ratified, and in due course, going up with him to Jerusalem for the enrolment ordered by Caesar Augustus, Mary gave birth in a rock-hewn stable at Bethlehem to Jesus Christ, the God-man (Christmas day, December 25). Forty days later, in accordance with the Jewish law, she presented herself and her Child in the Temple for her ritual purification (February 2), an observance abrogated by the law of Christ which sees nought but honour in sanctified child-bearing. Warned by an angel, St Joseph fled with his wife and the holy Child into Egypt, to avoid the jealous rage of King Herod; it is not known how long they lived there, but when Herod was dead they returned to their old home at Nazareth.

For the thirty years before the public ministry of Jesus began Mary lived the outward life of any other Jewish woman of the common people. There are some who, concentrating their hearts and minds on our Lady in her glorified state as queen of Heaven, or as participating in the chief mysteries of the life of her Son, lose all memory of her day by day life as a woman in this world. The sonorous and beautiful titles given to her in the litany of Loreto; representations of her in art, from the graceful delicate ladies of Botticelli to the prosperous bourgeoises of Raphael; the efforts of writers and preachers who feel that ordinary language is inadequate to describe her perfections; these and many other influences help to glorify the Mother of God—but somewhat tend to make us forget the wife of Joseph the carpenter. The Lily of Israel, the Daughter of the princes of Judah, the Mother of all Living, was also a peasant-woman, a Jewish peasant-woman, the wife of a working-man. Her hands were scored with labour, her bare feet dusty, not with the perfumed powder of romance but with the hard stinging grit of Nazareth, of the tracks which led to the well, to the olive-gardens, to the synagogue, to the cliff whence they would have cast Him. And then, after those thirty years, those feet were still tired and dusty, but now with following her divine Son from afar in His public life, from the rejoicings of the wedding-feast at Cana to His dereliction and her desolation on Mount Calvary, when the sword spoken of by Simeon at the purification pierced her heart. The dying Jesus confided her to the care of St John, “and from that hour the disciple took her to his own”. On the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost descended on our Lady when He came upon the Apostles and other disciples gathered together in the upper room at Jerusalem: that is the last reference to her in the Sacred Scriptures. The rest of her earthly life was probably passed at Jerusalem, with short sojourns at Ephesus and other places in company with St John and during the times of Jewish persecution.

Mary is the mother of Jesus, Jesus is God, therefore she is the Mother of God; the denial of this was condemned by the third general council at Ephesus in 431. Both before and after her miraculous child-bearing she was a virgin and so remained all her days, according to the unanimous and perpetual tradition and teaching of the Church. That she remained for her whole life absolutely sinless is affirmed by the Council of Trent. As the “second Eve” Mary is the spiritual mother of all living, and veneration is due to her with an honour above that accorded to all other saints; but to give divine worship to her would be idolatry, for Mary is a creature, like the rest of human-kind, and all her dignity comes from God.

It has been for ages the explicit belief of the Church that the body of the Blessed Virgin was preserved from corruption and taken into Heaven and re-united to her soul, by an unique anticipation of the general resurrection. This preservation from corruption and assumption to glory was a privilege which seems due to that body which was never defiled by sin, which was ever the most holy and pure temple of God, preserved from all contagion of Adam and the common curse of mankind: that body from which the eternal Word received His own flesh, by whose hands He was nourished and clothed on earth, and whom He vouchsafed to obey and honour as His mother. Whether or not our Lady died is not certain; but it is generally held that she did in fact die before her glorious assumption, some conjecture at Ephesus but others think rather at Jerusalem. But did this feast commemorate only the assumption of her soul, and not of her body as well, its object would still be the same. For, as we honour the departure of other saints out of this world, so we have great reason to rejoice and praise God on this day when the Mother of Christ entered into the possession of those joys which He had prepared for her.

At the time that Alban Butler wrote, belief in our Lady’s bodily assumption to Heaven was still, in the words of Pope Benedict XIV, a probable opinion the denial of which would be impious and blasphemous; and so it remained for another two hundred years. Then, in 1950, after taking counsel with the whole Church through her bishops, Pope Pius XII solemnly declared this doctrine to be divinely revealed and an article of faith. In the bull Munificentissimus Deus he declared that:

the remarkable unanimity of the Catholic episcopacy and faithful in the matter of the definibility of our Lady’s bodily assumption into Heaven as a dogma of faith showed us that the ordinary teaching authority of the Church and the belief of the faithful which it sustains and directs were in accord, and thereby proved with infallible certainty that that privilege is a truth revealed by God and is contained in the divine deposit which Christ entrusted to His bride the Church, to be guarded faithfully and declared with infallible certainty.

And on November 1, the feast of All Saints, the pope promulgated the bull publicly in the square before St Peter’s basilica at Rome, defining the doctrine in the following terms:

Having repeatedly raised prayers of urgent supplication to God and having called upon the light of the Spirit of Truth—to the glory of Almighty God, who has bestowed His signal favours on Mary; in honour of His Son, deathless King of all the ages and conqueror of sin and death; to the increase of the glory of the same exalted Mother; and to the joy and exultation of the whole Church: By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, by that of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, We pronounce, declare and define to be divinely revealed the dogma that the immaculate Mother of God, the Ever-virgin Mary, was on the completion of her earthly life assumed body and soul into the glory of Heaven.

The assumption of the Virgin Mary is “St Mary’s day” par excellence, the greatest of all the festivals which the Church celebrates in her honour, and it is the titular feast of all churches dedicated under her name without any special invocation. It is the consummation of all the other great mysteries by which her life was made wonderful; it is the birthday of her greatness and glory, and the crowning of all the virtues of her whole life, which we admire singly in her other festivals. It is for all these gifts conferred on her that we praise and thank Him who is the author of them, but especially for that glory with which He has crowned her. Nevertheless, whilst we contemplate the glory to which Mary is raised on this day, we ought to consider how she arrived at the mother of happiness, that we may walk in her steps. That she should be the mother of her Creator was the most wonderful miracle and the highest dignity; yet it was not properly this that God crowned in her. It was her virtue that He considered: her charity, her humility, her purity, her patience, her meekness, her paying to God the most perfect homage of worship, love, praise and thanksgiving.

To discuss in brief space the introduction and development of our Lady’s Assumption feast would not be easy. Three points seem clear. First that the building of churches in veneration of Mary, the Theotokos, Mother of God, inevitably brought in its train the celebration of some sort of dedication feast. That such churches dedicated to our Lady existed both in Ephesus and at Rome in the first half of the fifth century is certain, and some scholars think it probable that “a commemoration of the ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God” was known at Antioch as early as A.D. 370. Secondly, in such a commemoration or annual feast of the Blessed Virgin no stress was at first laid upon the manner of her departure from this world. In her case, as in the case of the martyrs and other saints, it was simply the heavenly “birthday” (natalis) which was originally honoured, and the festival was spoken of indifferently either as the “birthday”, or the “falling-asleep” (dormitio), the “passing away” (transitus), the “deposition”, or the “assumption”. Thirdly, according to an apocryphal but ancient belief, the Blessed Virgin actually died on the anniversary of her Son’s birth, i.e. on Christmas day. As this day was consecrated to the veneration of the Son, any distinctive commemoration of the Mother had to be postponed. In some parts of the world this separate feast was assigned to the winter season. Thus we know from St Gregory of Tours (c. 580) that a great feast in Mary’s honour was then kept in Gaul in the middle of January. But it is equally certain that in Syria there was a summer feast on the fifth day of the month Ab, roughly August. This, with some fluctuations, was also adopted in the West, and in England St Aldhelm (c. 690) speaks plainly of our Lady’s “birthday” being kept in the middle of August.